There are numerous reasons to be excited about iOS 26 — the introduction of Apple’s innovative Liquid Glass design language, personalized backgrounds for text chats, and enhancements to CarPlay — but we are here to present eight additional reasons. This week, the Unicode Consortium revealed the emoji that will be included in the Unicode 17.0 release this fall. It features a diverse assortment, including a treasure chest, an apple core, and even Bigfoot. Unfortunately, these won’t be available on your iPhone’s emoji keyboard immediately, but an upcoming iOS 26 update will bring all eight.
## New emoji arriving in iOS 26
To start, let’s examine the standard versions of all eight emoji characters being integrated into the Unicode Standard with Unicode 17.0:
Here’s a comprehensive list of the official titles of all the new emoji, for those interested:
– Trombone
– Treasure Chest
– Distorted Face
– Apple Core
– Fight Cloud
– Ballet Dancers
– Hairy Creature
– Orca
Apple typically develops its own variations of emojis prior to their release in its software. Consequently, iPhone users often have to wait several months to access the new characters. The emoji introduced with Unicode 16.0 didn’t make their way to iPhones until iOS 18.4 was launched in March 2025, which was a full six months after Unicode 16.0’s release.
Fortunately, this set is considerably more entertaining than what we received with Unicode 16.0. While I’m uncertain when or how I’ll use half of them, I can envision “Fight Cloud” becoming a staple in group chats with family members. And that “Distorted Face” is certainly something special.
